Month: May 2016

Bureau van Dijk (BvD) is releasing a new user interface for their ORBIS financial analysis product. The ORBIS product line provides global company financial analysis tools with very deep financial coverage of European privates. This platform is also employed for regional products such as Amadeus (Europe), Oriana (AsiaPac), and country specific products within Europe such as Fame (UK), Markus (Germany, Austria, Luxembourg), and Ruslana (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan).

The modernized UI is fast to use and supports tablets. New features include an icon-based navigation panel along the left edge and improved multi-step searches. Users can also group their favorite search steps together and adjust list layouts.

The new ORBIS UI provides streamlined searching and list building.

New report types include a visual profile and “Excel-friendly financial worksheets.” Users can also quickly share searches, results, and reports with colleagues.

A new Tools Zone provides a set of analytical tools for peer analysis, pivot-table building, ownership research, and Excel plug-ins.

The new ORBIS Toolbox

Both the old and new UI will be available while users migrate their saved searches and reports to the new ORBIS.

The firm did not indicate whether similar enhancements were planned for the MINT sales product line.

ORBIS is the leading financial analysis tool for European and AsiaPac companies. They have been rapidly expanding their global company coverage and now span 200 million companies (roughly 3/4 of which are active) with market leading company linkage (ownership) intelligence. This dataset is available in ORBIS, their regional financial analysis editions, MINT sales intelligence editions, and their line of Catalyst workflow tools (e.g. credit risk analysis, transfer pricing, valuation).

Content as a Service vendor Campaign Stars has partnered with sales and marketing intelligence firm InsideView to deliver InsideView Target within the Campaign Stars platform. According to Campaign Stars, “Marketers enjoy jumps in conversion rates of 45% or more when combining audience segmentation with content optimization.”

“Campaign Stars’ clients simply share their brand’s vision and insight via their collaboration platform, purchase credits that are redeemable for any number of services, and select what assets they need. Campaign Stars then targets their audience, creates the content, delivers it via the client’s marketing automation software, and then tracks campaign performance across dozens of key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketers can buy more credits whenever they need, and they never have to exhaust their own bandwidth to create engaging content,” said Campaign Stars CEO Henry Bruckstein.

Campaign Stars assigns two creative teams to projects, allowing them to separately develop and test content against a sample of targeted prospects. The two campaigns are then compared across a set of key performance indicators. This process, called Campaign Optimization, results in the more effective campaign being rolled out broadly.

“Our commitment is always to help our customers get the best results possible from their content campaigns,” said Bruckstein. “Our partnership with InsideView gives CampaignStars marketers integrated access to over 25 million B2B contacts across 800 industries. It’s like a turbo charge for your campaign.”

To entice InsideView customers to test out Campaign Stars, the firms are offering Campaign Stars credits to InsideView customers.

“Campaign Stars gives you something to say; InsideView gives you the right contacts to say it to,” said Heidi Tucker, VP Alliances at InsideView. “By partnering, customers now get both the fuel and the engine. Together, we are a total one-stop shop for market intelligence, content creation, and delivery automation – the entire journey, as easy as saying ‘Go.'”

Since launching its API a few years ago, InsideView has been very aggressive in identifying emerging opportunities for partnership. In March, they announced licensing deals with ABSD vendors QuotaFactory and SalesLoft.

Campaign Stars is also a partner of Quota Factory. “You can harness the power of the ultimate marketing one-two punch. Create engaging content faster than ever before to drive more qualified leads, and convert more of those leads than you ever thought possible with QuotaFactory’s dynamic PRM system,” said Bruckstein about their joint value proposition. “Identify more prospects, qualify more leads, and convert more sales. Guide your customers along the buying journey every step of the way with an uninterrupted stream of high-octane content, and get them across the finish line with a multi-faceted cascade of targeted, effective follow-up communication.”

Campaign Stars lists partnerships with the major B2B marketing automation platforms. They also list DiscoverOrg as a partner, but the partnership has yet to be formally announced.

DiscoverOrg contact lists can now be pushed to the Outreach account based sales communication platform for cadence-structured messaging. According to DiscoverOrg, “This integration allows for more effective communication with prospects based on persona, combining both comprehensive, verified contact data and personalized, timely interactions.”

“The number one challenge facing salespeople today is not knowing who to call or how to reach them,” said DiscoverOrg VP of Sales Patrick Purvis. “What is the actual strategy or sort of plan of attack in reaching out to these people [prospects] to get as many of them to engage with you and respond as possible?”

DiscoverOrg, with 750,000 global contacts in IT, Marketing, Finance, and Product Management, provides emails and direct dial phones to resolve the who to call problem. Contact records are passed with tags into the Outreach platform and auto-refreshed as DiscoverOrg editors update profiles. DiscoverOrg supports one-click send to Outreach which begins managing the messaging sequence. Because the contacts are passed from a technology sales intelligence platform, the messaging can focus on the platforms, industries, job functions, and responsibilities of individual contacts. This type of one-to-one messaging has only recently become available to the SDR function through products such as Outreach, SalesLoft, and QuotaFactory.

Outreach Flow schedules manual and automated emails, phone calls, direct mail, and LinkedIn messaging. Other features include analytics, reply detection, “intelligent follow ups,” out of office detection which pauses the sequence, and open and click tracking. Outreach also offers connectors for LinkedIn, Gmail, and Salesforce.com.

Furthermore, because DiscoverOrg is passing firmographics and biographical data, Outreach users can assess which messages are fostering engagement. Broad prospect tagging combined with analytics is important to sales management and operations because “downstream, they can look at what message is resonating” said DiscoverOrg CEO Schuck. “They have complete information on the records that are moving through their system.”

Outreach Dashboard Analytics

“There has been increasing focus on the SDR role as a key growth-accelerator with a lot of investment in the technology to support this function,” said Schuck. “These are the guys on the front lines, pounding the phones every day and teeing up the sale for the closers. Partnering with a robust sales communication platform like Outreach, we aim to set SDRs up for success with high-quality contact data to improve response rates and set more appointments.”

The sales intelligence industry has taken two approaches to ABSD: partnering or developing a subset of ABSD features. The partnering path has been taken by InsideView (SalesLoft and Quota Factory) and DiscoverOrg (SalesLoft and Outreach). The build path has been executed by RainKing which added a dialer last year and Sales Genie which offers a dialer, email, marketing creative, and direct mail functionality.

The SalesforceIQ Inbox provides a set of desktop and mobile productivity apps for which bring Salesforce intelligence to the email Inbox.

Salesforce.com had another beat and raise quarter where they beat expectations and raised their revenue guidance. When you are growing at 27% year over year (28% once currency headwinds are factored in), it is easy to have a succession of beat and raise quarters — All you have to do is figure out how to add two billion dollars in revenue this year and then continue to do so geometrically every year forward.

On Wednesday’s earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff claimed that SFDC continues to invest heavily in its sales cloud platform while competitors have invested elsewhere. Remarking on SFDC’s continued leadership position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, he stated that

Everyone else kind of abandoned their technology in this area and they are trying to give it a lot of lip service, but the reality is there is just no comparison between what we have and what the other vendors have at this point. It’s incredible and it comes through in our demos, it comes through in our wins, and it comes through in the core customer success.”

The Sales Cloud, their oldest and largest cloud, saw an acceleration in its growth rate due to its Salesforce1 “rebooting” combined with the new Lightning user experience which was designed as mobile first. Other growth drivers were Pardot, their B2B marketing automation platform, and the recently acquired SteelBrick CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) service.

Lightning also supports the Force platform. It’s mobile development capabilities help developers “rapidly build and expand and create these applications using Lightning and deploy them on all these different devices,” said Benioff. “Lightning is so unique and so special in the industry. It lets our customers build these applications quickly at a very low cost and deploy them across so many different platforms that we’re going to see a continued growth in core clouds.”

The Next Growth Driver: Artificial Intelligence

Benioff also discussed past and future growth drivers for Salesforce and the tech industry. Past drivers include cloud computing and social with mobile as a key current driver. Moving forward, growth will come from the integration of artificial intelligence across SFDC to improve customer experience and workflows. Benioff provided the new SalesforceIQ Inbox service as an example:

[The] Salesforce Inbox is very exciting because it uses artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to work with our users, to work with our emails, to work with their calendars, and work with their CRM data to give them perspective ideas on exactly how do be more efficient in the sales, service, and marketing processes of their companies…

This is another major growth factor because it will appear in sales, it will appear in service, it will appear in marketing.

For the past few years, Benioff has been discussing the importance of being a customer company that interacts with customers across a broad set of platforms and departmental touch points with “systems of intelligence.” It is along this front that SFDC has staked out its most recent competitive differentiation:

We’re in the midst of a massive generational shift; a new generation of customers and consumers is clearly emerging. We have been calling them here at Salesforce C generation customers. Customer generation, consumer generation that these are people who want it now, they want it fast, they want it easy, and they’re mobile, they’re social, they’re always on, and our customers are working to connect with the C generation in new ways, very exciting. I mean this is really part of a huge shift that’s happening in computing. We’ve gone from the first generation of computing which was very much about systems of record to the second generation which was systems of engagement we talked about that on these calls many times over the last 10 years. And we are clearly moving into this incredible world that the system of intelligence that’s all yielding these incredible systems of customers or C generation customers that are — that our customers are connecting to. And that’s we’re so excited about.

Focusing on the customer, delivering systems of intelligence, developing a mobile-first platform, betting on the cloud when the tech market is collapsing, and embracing social. These decisions all seem obvious in retrospect, but in the fog of corporate battle, the trick is to identify and implement the next wave early and better than anybody else. When you think about it, that’s easy — sort of like growing revenue by two billion dollars this year.

SalesFlower is a stripped down version of Infofree focused on B2B prospecting.

Infofree, a sales intelligence company that focuses on the SMB segment, has launched a lower-priced, stripped-down, B2B-only version of its service under the brand name Salesflower.com. The new service supports list building, company and executive lookup, and new business searching.

“Lead Generation is the life blood of any business that wants to grow their sales. Salesflower.com is the only service that is offering triple-verified B2B sales leads at a very low price. For most businesses, if they get one sale from Salesflower.com it will pay for the service,” said CEO Rakesh Gupta.

The new service is priced at $595 per month and bundles in 5,000 downloads per annum with additional downloads available for ten cents per record. The service includes a thirty-day money-back guarantee and claims a 95% level of accuracy. Emails are cleaned monthly and have a claimed accuracy rate of 70%.

Coverage spans

14 Million Triple Verified Businesses

12 Million Verified Business Executives

30 Thousand New Businesses Weekly

23 Million Executive Emails

6 Million Professionals (Doctors, Attorneys, etc.)

Screening variables are limited to basic firmographics along with County, Radius, and Bounding Box. While SICs are supported, NAICS are not mentioned. Yes, SICs are better known, but they have not been updated since 1987 and were replaced by the NAICS taxonomy two decades ago.

Over the past few years, the price for Infofree has been raised as it has added features. Infofree is one of the few sales intelligence products that supports businesses that sell broadly to both businesses and consumers (Sales Genie addresses a similar market). Infofree clients include business services, security companies, insurance agencies, etc.

Salesflower provides Infofree with a fighter brand at a lower price point which they can sell into firms that do not require consumer intelligence or CRM101.

InsideView’s new download limits take effect for all InsideView Sales customers on June 1st. Going forward, users will only receive 500 company and 500 contact credits per month. The maximum size of a download file remains 2,000 records. These limits are well below those of their top two competitors, Hoover’s and Avention; InsideView now heavily targets the marketing function, so they are becoming miserly with respect to downloads in their flagship sales offering.

Customers looking for broader limits can license InsideView Target, their prospecting service for marketers.

InsideView also announced a set of enhancements, the most important of which was InsideView Target’s one-click list Send to Eloqua feature. Target checks for duplicate contacts based on emails, ensuring that uploaded prospects are net-new. Marketo connector functionality is also available.

InsideView Target now supports Eloqua synch with duplicate checking.

Other May release announcements were fairly minor:

The mobile product displays 90 days of news instead of 30.

InsideView for CRM provides direct access to the full InsideView company or executive profile by clicking on the name.

This is a bit off the beaten path for my usual discussions, but it is always welcome when a company is able to create new products which take their core capabilities and direct them towards a global (or local) problem. In this case, Dun & Bradstreet has developed a Human Trafficking Risk Index which helps firms avoid dodgy suppliers that may be using slave labor. What’s more, this appears to be the first in a series of “Responsible Business Analytics” products they are planning to launch.

Their new Human Trafficking Risk Index helps procurement departments identify potential vendors that utilize trafficked labor (21 million people globally). This shadow economy has been sized at $150 billion in annual illegal profits by the International Labor Organization. Dun & Bradstreet is combining data from the US Departments of State and Labor with their global linkage information to help their customers “address supply chain risk while also helping them to be responsible corporate citizens.”

In “Trafficking in Persons Report” (July 2015), Secretary of State John Kerry said “This year’s Report places a special emphasis on human trafficking in the global marketplace. It highlights the hidden risks that workers may encounter when seeking employment and the steps that governments and businesses can take to prevent trafficking, including a demand for transparency in global supply chains.”

When people are asked about Dun & Bradstreet, they usually think of business credit reports, but the credit products are part of a broader Risk Management Solutions division that covers both business credit and supplier risk. Along with credit scores, they have one of the world’s leading company databases, the 250 million company WorldBase file, which covers both active and inactive companies with deep company linkage. It is this linkage intelligence that helps firms see through shells and holding companies to connect known bad actors with the rest of the organization.

Companies are already looking for the risk management companies to assist with KYC (Know Your Client), AML (anti-money laundering), and PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) to root out corruption. Responsible Business Analytics is simply the next set of tools for helping companies act responsibly, maintain compliance, and avoid reputational black eyes.

What was impressed me was that on their Q1 earnings call, CEO Bob Carrigan spent a few minutes of his prepared remarks discussing their new index. His focus wasn’t on profitability or future revenue streams, but about helping to reduce a global problem. Carrigan argued that the role of the Chief Procurement Officer has expanded from optimizing the supplier base to managing supply risk including reputational risk. Thus, the CPO needs tools that assist with regulatory compliance and brand risk management. According to Carrigan,

Our supply risk solutions help customers manage this full spectrum of risks. Today, CPOs have a fast growing need in what we call “Responsible Business Analytics” to help them guard against regulatory and reputational risks. We help them as they comply with Government diversity requirements and monitor global banned entity lists, as well as meeting their social responsibility commitments like funding suppliers with sustainable business practices and meeting best in class ethics standards.

Is this a product category that will be a big money maker for Dun & Bradstreet? I doubt it. But at the margins, it provides a differentiator between Dun & Bradstreet and other supply risk vendors. As such, it could tip a few deals their way while helping to reduce the profits of human traffickers.